And as they led him away, they seized one Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in
from the country, and laid on him the cross, to carry it behind Jesus.

MEDITATION

He was returning from the countryside, perhaps after a few
hours of work. Awaiting him at home were the preparations for the holy day:
sunset, in fact, would mark the beginning of the Sabbath, as the first stars
began to shine in the evening sky. His name was Simon; he was a Jew, a
native of Cyrene, a city on the Libyan strand which was home to a large
community of the Jewish Diaspora[23].
A curt order by the Roman soldiers escorting Jesus stops him in his tracks and
forces him to take a turn at carrying the cross of that half-dead convict.

Simon was a chance passerby; he did not know how
extraordinary that encounter was to be. As someone once wrote[24],
“how many men over the centuries would have wanted to be there, in his place, to
have been passing by just at that moment. But it was too late; he was the one
who had passed by and over the centuries he would never have yielded his place
to others.” Here we see the mystery of the unexpected encounter with God which
happens in so many lives. Paul, the Apostle, had been intercepted, seized and
“overcome”[25] by Christ on the way to
Damascus. And this led him to ponder anew those astonishing words of God: “I
have been found by those who did not seek me; I have shown myself to those who
did not ask for me”[26].

* * *

God lies in waiting along the paths of our daily life. At
times he knocks on our door and asks to sit at our table to eat with us[27].
Even a chance encounter, like that of Simon of Cyrene, can become a gift of
conversion. Indeed, the Evangelist Mark will name of the sons of that man,
Alexander and Rufus, as fellow Christians[28].
The Cyrenean is thus the emblem of the mysterious embrace of divine grace
and human effort. In the end, the Evangelist paints him as the disciple who
“takes up the cross behind Jesus” and follows in his footsteps
[29].

His gesture, carried out under constraint, becomes a symbol
for every act of solidarity with the suffering, the oppressed, the weary.
The Cyreanean thus represents the innumerable host of generous persons,
missionaries, Samaritans who do not “pass by on the other side” of the
street
[30], but bend low to assist the
suffering, to lift them up and to give them support. Over Simon’s head and
shoulders, bent beneath the weight of the cross, echo the words of Saint Paul:
“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ”[31].